Wireless networks have grown increasingly in importance and have varying uses. In order to provide secure and reliable communications standards have been developed. Although the present invention is not limited to a particular standard, once such standard, the WiMAX standard, specifies an (Automatic Repeat reQuest) ARQ mechanism to provide reliable communication over a wireless link between a Base Station (BS) and Subscriber Station (SS). The WiMax standard may also referred to as the 802.16 standard and is published by the institute for electronic and electrical engineers (IEEE).
In this mechanism, transmission occurs in units of blocks, where a block contains certain number of information bits. When a block is lost, it is retransmitted by the sender. As per the WiMAX standard specification, such retransmissions are triggered at the sending side by the expiration of a retransmission timer associated with the block when the acknowledgement (ACK) for the block is not received or when an explicit Non-acknowledgement (NACK) is received from the receiver. However, this technique may cause delays in transmissions and therefore make the wireless network less reliable.
Thus, a strong need exists for techniques to expedite retransmission of ARQ blocks using temporal relationships in wireless networks.
It will be appreciated that for simplicity and clarity of illustration, elements illustrated in the figures have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements are exaggerated relative to other elements for clarity. Further, where considered appropriate, reference numerals have been repeated among the figures to indicate corresponding or analogous elements.